Color at night

For some reason tonight, everywhere I looked, colors seemed more vivid. I read for a while and then went skating after the sun went down. This is a pic of the top of the parking garage at the mall near my house. The colors jumped out at me. I skated all through the garages and stopped to take pics when the light or color struck me as particularly interesting.


Architecture at the mall is interesting as well. When you think of a suburban mall, you don't think of cool architecture much, you just think it's a conglomeration of bad stores and people pacifying themselves by purchasing material objects, with minivans and SUVs in the parking lot. During the day, if you walk down this tunnel, it's nothing special. But at night, it becomes much more intresting because of that giant flourescent tube light. And it becomes more interesting still when you look down it at ground level, rather than at the eye level you'd see it at if you just walked through it.

Look at the colors in this picture. They're just amazing. That bluey-green color reflected in the glass contrasts so remarkably with the yellows and oranges of all the lights below it. I wonder how much of this is planned and how much of it is a happy accident; it looked so much more vivid in real life even than it does in this image.






This might look dull and industrial, but its secret identity is giant skating playground. The pavement is smooth, the cars are gone for the day, there are ramps to the left and behind the camera, and it's heaven. It's built entirely of gray concrete and lit with industrial flourescent and incandescent bulbs, but when the air is just so, when the haze is just right, pinks and greens and blues and oranges appear on the shine on the concrete, and a parking garage becomes beautiful.

One more, then I'm finished.

This is another tunnel leading into the mall that I did some fiddling with in Picasa. I dig how the light fell on that metal bar above the doorway, illuminating it and making it look like a cross. This almost, in fact, looks like a big church. But it's just the mall.

Things become more than what they are, at night. The colors come out to play.